Aromatic Operation

Farm produces enough mint oil to flavor 6 million tubes of toothpaste

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Austin Schomberg, left, and Cecle Defries disconnect Schomberg’s truck from a ‘‘tub,’’ where the chopped mint from the field will cook under steam heat to release the mint oil. (S. John Collins / Baker City Herald) - baker city herald

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Austin Schomberg, left, and Cecle Defries disconnect Schomberg’s truck from a ‘‘tub,’’ where the chopped mint from the field will cook under steam heat to release the mint oil. (S. John Collins / Baker City Herald)9044826

This year the Wards will harvest mint from about 350 acres. The process will take roughly two weeks, as they strive to cut about 25 acres per day.

The 2019 harvest ranges from fields planted six years ago, which will produce their fifth and final crop, to what Ward calls “baby mint.”

The family last year planted a 55-acre field, just south of Hughes Lane and west of the Leo Adler Memorial Parkway, that will yield its first crop this month.

Ward said some passers-by have asked him about the prevalence of weeds in that field, wondering if the crop was ailing.

Quite the opposite, he said.

“That’s one of the best baby mint fields we’ve ever had,” Ward said last week.

The abundance of weeds reflects the fledgling nature of the mint, he said.

“The first year we can’t use certain types of herbicides,” Ward said.

Next year, with the mint better established, the Wards will deal more aggressively with the weeds, he said.

Mint fields generally produce their most bountiful crops in their third and fourth years, Ward said.

In the fields

Regardless of the age of the crop, the timing of the harvest is based on the same criterion, Ward said.

The optimum time to cut mint, he said, is when the first bloom appears in a field.

“If the field’s totally bloomed, we’re too late,” he said.

If the mint is allowed to bloom too long the oil will have higher concentrations of a compound than the end users want, Ward said.

It’s important to maintain a variety of ages among the fields, he said, because the older the plants, the sooner they bloom.

Baby mint is the last to be harvested.

After the mint is cut it needs to lie on the ground for at least four days before it’s chopped, Ward said.

That allows the mint’s moisture content to drop toward the target of 30%.

During that period the crop, in common with alfalfa, is vulnerable to rain, which can snap off leaves. Because the leaves contain the oil, rain damage reduces the yield, Ward said.

His family’s crop suffered some losses from thundershowers that passed through Baker Valley earlier this month.

“The rain was a bad deal,” he said.

When the mint is ready, the chopper disgorges the crop into massive yellow-orange containers, called tubs, that are towed directly behind the chopper.

The filled tubs are parked in a line of four bays outside the still.

In the still

The defining characteristic of the still, besides the overwhelming aroma of mint, is heat.

A room on the north end of the building is packed nearly to capacity with a natural gas-powered 500-horsepower boiler.

The boiler produces 260-degree steam that travels through a network of pipes to the mint-stuffed tubs outside.

The steam, which enters near the bottom of the tubs at a pressure of about 16 pounds per square inch, rises through the chopped mint, capturing oil and water from the plants as it rises.

Vents at the tops of the tubs direct this oil-laden vapor into the condensers, where tubes filled with cold water condense the vapor into the liquid that then pours into the collectors.

Ward said a “great crop” will yield about 100 pounds of pure oil per acre.

“And that’s our goal, to grow a great crop,” he said.

Last week, with the harvest near its midpoint, Ward said production was running at about 80 pounds of oil per acre.

For perspective, that’s enough oil to put the bite, so to speak, in approximately 6,350,000 tubes of toothpaste.

(Colgate toothpaste, Ward emphasizes with a grin.)

A crop almost everybody notices

Ward said he has enjoyed growing mint, and producing oil, over the past quarter century.

One reason is that mint, though it’s a rather retiring plant, never growing too tall and lacking the lyrical inspiration of, say, amber waves of wheat, produces that unique and conspicuous aroma.

Ward said that when local residents ask him what he does for a living, and he tells them he’s a farmer who grows, among other things, mint, almost invariably he hears a variation on this theme — “I just love it when you’re harvesting.”

But the distillation process enhances that smell considerably. When the wind is blowing from the northwest, as it often does during August in Baker City, the pungency from the Wards’ still can permeate much of town.

Ward said just recently a motorcycle rider twice rolled past one of the family’s mint fiel ds before stopping at the still to tell Ward how nice it is ride next to a mint crop.

Ward admits, though, that it took some years before he truly appreciated mint as a cash crop.

In terms of gratifying growth, it’s something of a procrastinator, stubbornly holding out for hot weather.

“It’ll sit there and look at you for two months and grow maybe an inch while you’re putting hundreds of dollars per acre of water and fertilizer on it,” he said with a rueful chuckle. “And then about late June it decides to start growing.